Ashley Mears: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you take the men who go to these clubs, do you think they’re much more narcissistic in terms of their basic personality features? Or do you think that most men, given the opportunity, could fit into those slots readily and just slide into that world? [laughs] Yeah, I think that most men really could slide into that world. For sure, those across the spectrum — there are some people for whom this really ticks the box. This satisfies a need to be seen and to feel high status, and it’s very validating and very important. I don’t think that’s necessarily a stable attribute of that person over their life course. It might just fit the banker culture that they’re immersed in when they’re 30 and working on Wall Street. On the other hand, I think that a lot of, for instance, academics who look at this and hold their nose and say these are pathological status-seeking people would probably also enjoy a night or two out in these arenas. Part of it’s because a nightclub — they’re really good at orchestrating this experience so that it feels good. This was something that was really interesting. I also did interviews with the people that are buying bottles — only 20, so not a random sample, but just to get a sense of how do people talk about and process and put into words what they’re experiencing at these clubs. And those people themselves, who even spend a lot of money on bottles, would talk about it as like, “Yeah, it’s tacky,” or “It’s ridiculous,” or “I know that it looks bad.” So everybody knows that status is a sensitive good. You can’t just go out and buy it without losing status, right? Everybody knows that, and yet the club is really good at setting it up so that it feels completely appropriate, and it’s celebrated, and it feels good to be in these spaces. It’s really thrilling and exciting to be in them. Can the non-deliberateness of status seeking be sustained in the longer run? Let me explain that. If you’re too obviously throwing money around to look like a high-status person, you don’t look high status, so it’s all made casual and indirect. But over time, people figure out those are the casual indirect signals for something that is actually somewhat grossly low status. So how does the equilibrium keep in place? Doesn’t everyone figure out that the casual behavior is totally deliberate?…

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